I love where metaphor slams into the literal minded. I slow down metaphor so my ninth graders can watch themselves experience it. I teach three stages of experiencing metaphor: confusion, realization (that we’re dealing with a metaphor), and greater understanding.

I use this Tango Clear ad in which the viewer goes through the three stages: 1. Confusion (the appearance of the fireman, the islander, the Eskimo, etc.), 2. Realization (“It’s just a metaphor”), and 3. Greater understanding (Tango Clear is refreshing).

Then we experience Sylvia Plath’s poem “Metaphors” together, realizing that we’re going through the same three stages.

I think this text in John slows down and examines the same three stages. It’s like the Tango Clear ad because each character is at a different stage of experiencing metaphor. The Jews never learn that “temple” is a metaphor for body. The disciples are like the slow-to-understand boss in the ad. And Mary and Nathanael in the surrounding stories who get Jesus’ unclear referents are like the Tango Clear coworker: “Nice metaphor.”

I think the ad shares one effective attribute with John’s gospel: the viewer isn’t exactly represented by any of the characters. We’re not a clueless as the boss or as tuned in as the coworker. Similarly, we’re not as clueless as the Jews, but we don’t grapple with the text over years like the disciples. It all comes so easily for the viewer and the reader. Or does it? That’s what haunts me about John. It never speaks to me directly. The text itself hides the truth as fast as it purports to testify to it. East meets West.

And I don’t know enough about Essene thought to contribute anything, but I’m glad to learn about it.

Anyway, if grammar is a reflection of morality, as I was implicitly taught growing up, then maybe metaphor is a matter of spiritual insight.

Because I agree with you that the misapprehension here doesn’t reflect a simple mistake. Instead, it’s like a quick brushstroke that suggests a more deep-seated spiritual problem. I just love the way it all turns on a word’s meaning, just as other quick portraits in John turn on an allusion to a fig tree (Nathanael) or on a Hebrew idiom (Jesus’ mother at the wedding).

Though I guess the Jews in this passage would have understood the reference to the body as a temple. I guess they didn’t connect the old with the new, didn’t connect their understanding of the body as a temple as applicable here. And maybe that says something about them.

I guess I write the narrative down in the belief that the narrative causes the tone and could also recreate it. Writing now, I’m not so sure. Good writers turn narrative to tone, but I’m not sure dreams do. Maybe the narrative and the feeling have an uneasy relationship in dreams.

I think my journal entries are my efforts to keep hold of it, as you put it, before I rise to the waking world.

I wasn’t being fair to you in my earlier comment. You expressed yourself well, and I thought I might be coming across as petulant. Forgive me! I do find it hard to listen to others’ dreams, though, perhaps because most accounts focus exclusively on the dream’s narrative.

I am jealous of other people’s dreams, too. Victoria wakes up with such vivid ones! She’ll talk of them as if she were returning from the cinema. Mine usually expose — the best ones even clarify — some real-life struggle. I also don’t remember all the detail others seem to. Every now and then, quite rarely, I get one I think is creative — a hint of something unclear that I need to pay attention to. The creativity isn’t usually just in the dream’s narrative but also in the tone. Those dreams I write down, too, more out of wonder than to practice getting across mood in narrative.